Case: Good Sport

Published 31.12.2013

Last updated 07.05.2017

#1 Short life update:

It’s been more than a while since I’ve added anything new but I assure you it’s only because I’ve been extremely busy. Last March I started working full day@Affecto. I also had quite a long lasting project (the title of this post) I’ve been working on my “free time”. Not that I would have done all of it free no. I’ve just been using most of my free time working and now that I think of it I guess I’ve been almost only working for the past half a year.

I’ve now been taking it easy for almost a month and I can assure you it feels good. I believe in working hard but you shouldn’t forget to rest once in a while. Working too hard starts sucking all the fun & joy out of your work and thus slowly even the smallest things start to feel owerwhelmingly laborsome. The last thing you want is that work starts to feel like work.

#2 The title promised content

So, as I din’t want to make an extra post just for a short update on my life I’ve prepended it to this post that very shortly talks about the Good Sport project I’ve been a part of.

Good Sport is a small Finnish company run by three certified ice hockey agents. Their old logo and web page looked *quite* outdated so they came to a deal with Bond to freshen up their look & identity. My part was to develop the site with the help of Roope and the designers at Bond.

Let’s cut straight to the things I have to say about the project from my point of view. Before reading the rest of my thoughts, just know that the project is live and can be found at goodsport.fi.

Lessons learned:

Be aware of the mouse wheel event listener, it can easily suck the rendering speed down the toilet.

Designing & building mobile first would have been the way to go from the start. It’s hard to switch to using this kind of “methodology” in the middle of the project.

Forced page by page scrolling navigation might look & feel cool at first but when you just need to get to specific piece of content fast it becomes really frustrating as it only slows you down.

Be aware of the kinds of setups where you have scrolling content inside scrolling content. The scrollbars are ugly & hard to hide / replace. This also quickly leads to usability issues in mobile & desktop.

Loading a full page good quality video background fast at desktop is almost impossible without some connection speed testing.

We should use SVG graphics a lot more than we do now on the web. Once you learn the few tricks you need to know atm. they are a blessing. Small & sharp at any size and on any display.

When working with nested scrolling containers you can easily “break” the scrollTop property. This is related to the overflow css property. Had to write my own function to calculate scrollTop values reliably in our setup.

Most importantly I learned a ton of things, became better at many of those and got a reminder how much I still have to learn (not that I’d know enough at any point in life). When you are in a web profession you can’t stop. There’s dozens of new things coming out every week at an inconsistent phase. This is a very interesting time. It’s cool to see the whole #webdev & #webdesign field expand at such a speed. It’s a shame though that now matter how hard you try you probably can’t learn or even read all the new things. My suggestion is to pick a few that are interesting ones from your point of view and focus on those.